An elegant 1950 home designed and built by Donald Scholz

 

Exactly what a house like this would cost to build depends, of course, upon where you build it and who does the building. But our estimate is plenty generous, for the very house pictured here, put up by a builder in Toledo, Ohio, where costs are high, is FHA financed for about $85 a month, with a down payment of $5,875. But even at the higher figure, it's such a whale of a house for the money that we couldn't resist grabbing a set of blueprints and material lists so you can duplicate it for your own family and spread out in it even i f that family is large. Here's what you get : three bedrooms, big-house size living room, dining room, kitchen, and a recreation room which doubles as an extra bedroom a lot of house in 1,200 sq. ft. plus double garage. It's a compact rectangle, yet planned so well that it behaves like a costly job with three wings. 

Open planning, where one space flows into the next, can be very awkward, but in this case it's excellent because the areas are distinctly separated from each other, though you get a feeling of overall spaciousness. There's no feeling of eating in the living room, yet living room and dining room can be used as one large area. The entry hall, at the left of the dining room, is separated from it not by a simple wall, but by a king-size coat closet. Bath and bedroom wing are on the other side of the entry so the living-dining area gets no cross-house traffic. The recreation room, behind the fireplace wall, can be used as a part of this area, but it also can be closed off completely. 

Kitchen eating area, a step from the recreation room, was well thought out for the mother of a brood. Youngsters at play or returning from school can enter the house through recreation-room door, eat their lunches or snacks here without ever disturbing the rest of the house 

Here you're looking from the long galley kitchen into the dining room. Notice the floor-to-ceiling cabinets with pass-through—they form the partition between these two rooms, store china where it's needed. The kitchen has washing machine and broom closet at one end, breakfast area at the other, and the cooking part is concentrated in the center to save steps and provide a good view for the cook from the sink.

Here's a big living room in which you can just sit down and enjoy yourself, your pleasure enhanced by the open view through the large window wall or by the fire on the corner hearth. This room doesn't have to double up as anything else, because there's an entirely separate dining area and a recreation room where both adults and youngsters can play, study, and work, or look at the television set.